75 achievements Oscar forgot

Michael WilmingtonTribune movie critic

When the Oscar nominations come out Tuesday, there are bound to be cries of injustice -- and in many cases, those charges will have merit. Can anyone really defend the exclusion from the Oscar nominee list in various years of movies such as "Some Like It Hot," or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or of acting performances such as Charlie Chaplin's sublime Tramp in "City Lights"?

The omissions of Graham Greene's "The Third Man" as a best original screenplay nominee or Alfred Hitchcock as best director for "Vertigo" or "Notorious" should alone be enough for a scandal. For anyone who feels, like director Spike Lee (for "Do the Right Thing"), they were robbed, there's a ready answer: You have lots of company. Why gripe, when we know that the Oscars tend to ignore certain kinds of movies (popular genre movies) and certain kinds of performances (funny ones)?

But there's always a consolation. Great movies outlast any award slights, and history almost always settles all accounts. To mark the 75th Academy Awards ceremony March 23, here are 75 of Oscar's most outrageous snubs.

75. "Touch of Evil" (Orson Welles, 1958) The pinnacle of film noir from Welles, Oscar's most unjustly neglected subject.

74. "King Kong" (Ernest Schoedsack-Merian Cooper, 1932-33) The Great Ape in the granddaddy of all special-effects classics.